As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Digital power management has been employed with digital power controller devices for information handling systems such as computer servers. Digital power controller devices provide benefits in terms of design, failure analysis, telemetry, efficiency, and debug. In such applications, memory in the form of non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) is integrated into each digital power controller device to store the firmware, configuration parameter, and persistent/data logging features such as black boxes of sampled data that lead up to a failure. Recently, the number of voltage regulators used in most computer server systems has also been increasing with each successive server generation. For example, one conventional 12G 2 CPU socket mainstream server has a minimum of 27 power devices (voltage regulators), with 12 of the power devices being digitally controlled voltage regulation components and with the balance of the power devices being analog voltage regulation components.
FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional digital power device control architecture 100 for a computer server according to the prior art. Architecture 100 includes multiple conventional digital power controller devices 108a-108d that each include a respective integrated NVRAM 110, a respective supervisory controller 112, a respective voltage regulator (VR) controller 116, and respective volatile random access memory (RAM) 114. Each digital power device 108 performs voltage regulation control tasks relating to power supplied to and consumed by an individual component of a computer server, such as the system central processing unit (CPU) or a system RAM main memory device. These voltage regulation control tasks include implementing smart power features, performing power monitoring and implementing power control. As further shown in FIG. 1, each digital power controller device 108 is individually coupled as shown to MUX 106 having general purpose input/outputs (GPIOs) that are controlled by a complex programmable logic device (CPLD) 102 using a Mux select signal to selectively couple a power management controller or baseboard management controller (BMC) 104 in communication with one of digital power devices 108 at a time to perform power system tasks such as reading out telemetry from each digital power device 108, updating configuration of firmware on each digital power device 108, or detecting fault data on each digital power device 108.
System BIOS has been implemented by a controller for host machines using serial peripheral interface, central agent, and NVRAM (SPI-Flash). The NVRAM may store multiple option ROM images for several devices. In such a conventional implementation, there is only one central agent (i.e., south-bridge Intel controlled hub/platform controller hub “ICH/PCH”) that does the read/write. The devices (PCIe devices, local area network on motherboard “LOM”, other input/output “IO” devices, etc.) do not have direct access to the NVRAM, rather only the central agent has access to the NVRAM.